Welcome to my Qbasic tutorials! Here you have the oppertunity to learn Qbasic. Before you continue obtain Qbasic form me or some other location. Once you have gone Qbasic scroll down or pick from the menue on the right. First, right click on Qb.exe, then click properties. Select the program tab. Change the Directories of Cmd Line and Working to that of the directory that they are in. if you dont do this you will get an error but you can still run Qbasic. next clcik on Sreen. clcik on window. now hit ok.
WARNING:if you run Qbasic in full screen mode you run the chance of crashing your computer. when you run it in fll mode you are switching from windows to DOS. some windows OS's when multi-tasking can crash when doing so. Qbasic is a DOS based program so i do not know how it will run on windows XP and othere versions. QBasic will work on windows 98 and below. if you are on XP or some other OS i believe there are some DOS emulators out there.
ok so now you should be ready to clcik on the QB.exe icon and should see the window shown above. the little yellow guy there is an icon i put ther. it doesnt matter just personal preffrence, i'll tell you how to do that later. oh ok so is every thing working? i hope so. if you got any issues so far reread the above or email me if you have not gotten it to work. that's mrynit@yahoo.com for those who have not got their POP3 configured. now a little programing info. in programing there are thre main parts commands functions and information. here you will learn qbasic commands and functions, you provide the information.
PRINT is a command that displays text on the screen in a DOS screen mode. click in the window, there should be a cursor indicating where you are. type print then "hello my name is Kristal" like the fallowing.
print "hello my name is Kristal"
using the arrows on the keyboard push the down arrow once so that the cursor goes down one line or hit enter. now the word print should be capilaized. now click on run, then start. you sould see some thing like this the red circle is to show you where the run button is. you can use commas, semi colen adn pluss signs to combined statements with PRINT. thype this into Qbasic.
PRINT "hello", "world"
PRINT "hello"; "world"
PRINT "hello" + "world"
then run it and you should get some thing like this
hello world
helloworld
helloworld
the comma places a tab space between the two statements, the semi-colen combined the two and so does teh pluss sign. Think up some thing you want to say and try to print it out.
you will notice that the last statements you print are still on the output screen. to clear the screen use the command CLS. CLS is the same command used in DOS. try this by copying the text and pasting it into Qbasic by clicking on the clipboard icon on the top menue.
CLS
PRINT "hellow world, clean screen!"
you should get a out put screen only showing hello world, clean screen! but if you do something like
PRINT "hello world"
CLS
you will not see any thing because the computer will print the statement out then clear it with CLS.
LPRINT is just like PRINT but insted of print world to teh srceen it prints it out to a printer. it only works on printers connected to a parallel port/printer port. it will not work on USB printers. also you must have your printer configured to print through DOS. i do not know how to do this and infact have never had LPRINT work for me. in short LPRINT is worthless in the midernage, but was handdy back in the 80's and 70's.
TAB(n); moves the carriage over like in a typwriter. put a number of the colume you want to move over to the right for n. TAB(n); is used with PRINT in this syntax PRINT TAB(n); [statement],[varriable]. i will discus varribles later. look at this exapmle
PRINT TAB(5); "this is spaced over the 5th colume on the screen"
PRINT "123456789"
it should look like this
this is spaced over the 5th colume
123456789
SPC(n); is much like TAB(n); just it's over one more space.
PRINT SPC(5); "6th collum"
PRINT "1234567890"
looks like this
6th collum
1234567890
STOP is a one word command. It does what it looks like, stops the program. STOP is diffent from END. The program will run the end where you put the stop command and will cut to the envroment screen( the blue part you type the stuff into) and skip the display in dos mode. Though if there is alot of stuff running then it may display. I am not sure. the purporse for the STOP I think is that it can be used in debugging, where you go about trying to make the code work the way you want it. STOP is another command you po